Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

TechCrunch40 Companies Announced

The TechCrunch40 companies have been announced. The conference is just starting now at 9:00AM Pacific Time. The companies will present in groups of five, and will each have 10 minutes to present. The expert panel will follow up with questions for about 30 minutes. The panel will rate each company on a scale of 1 to 10, on three criteria; business model, level of innovation, and quality of presentation. The winner gets $50,000. Let the fun beging. I will post more details on each company later. Here are the companies;

Search and Discovery

Powerset - semantic NLP search
Cognitive Code - AI for Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Cast.tv - video search
Faroo - distributed P2P search
Viewdle  - video indexing/search

Mobile and Communications

Cubic Telecom - Wi-Fi for cell phones - sort of like Skype
Yap - voice UI for SMS, texting, and web apps
Trutap - cell phone UI to connect social networking sites
Ceedo - virtualization for mobility
Loudtalks - like an Internet walkie-talkie

Community and Collaboration

Story Blender - online video collaboration
TripIt - organize your travel
Flock - social web browser
MusicShake - User created music
8020Everywhere - community created travel magazine

Crowd Sourcing

Cake Financial - personal investing social network
DocStoc - File sharing for business, legal, and technical documents
TeachThePeople - social network for sharing educational documents
CrowdSpirit - crowdsourcing for electronic products
Ponoko - Community to buy, sell, and share product designs

Productivity and Web Applications

Xobni - an organizer for email, inbox spelled backwards
Orgoo - all your email, IM, video, and SMS organized in one place
App2You - User built application framework with process and workflow built in
Mint Software - web based personal finance tools
Kerpoof - fun web apps for children. Like Club Penguin.

Revenue Models and Analytics

Spottt - a free banner ad exchange
Clickable - manage ad campaigns across all networks
GotStatus - stats and analytics service for any system or service
PubMatic - For web publishers to manage their ad inventory
ZocDoc- dentist and doctor appointment management

Rich Media and Mash Ups

Xtr3D - Extreme reality, human interface to computers
BroadClip - Scans Internet radio for music you want on your phone, iPod, Zune
mEgo - a site to share all your personal photos, notes, social network stuff
Wixi - All your media stored in one place
BeFunky - Funky avatars and ways to express yourself

Entertainment

FlowPlay - social entertainment platform for social games
Areae - Links to deep content organized by topic
WooMe - Online speed dating
Zivity - A site for glamour shots of beautiful women
DemoPit WildCard - one company from the 100 in the demo area will be invited to present to the full conference.

I'll have more details on each company as they present at the conference.

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TechCrunch40 - Sunday Night

TechCrunch40 is sold out. Pretty impressive for a first time conference. Congratulations to Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis. There are 800 people registered, probably another 100 press and bloggers, and a long waiting list.

Bloggers are already posting. My friend Ash Karbasfrooshan at MojoSupreme, and Allen Stern at CenterNetworks have prelim posts up.

There will be 40 companies presenting, in groups of 5, over two days. The list of companies is secret until 9:00AM Pacific Time on Monday morning. There will be 5 companies presenting at a time, organized in 8 broad categories. The categories are;

• Search & Discovery
• Mobile & Communications
• Community & Collaboration
• Crowd Sourcing
• Productivity & Web Apps
• Revenue models & Analytics
• Rich media & Mashups
• Entertainment

I will be on the expert panel on Monday afternoon. It is a real honor to be on the panel with the likes of Mark Cuban, Esther Dyson, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Guy Kawasaki, Om Malik, and other giants in the industry. Thanks to Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis for inviting me to be on the panel.

I hope to actively report from the conference twice a day on Monday and Tuesday, with 10 companies profiled in each post. There are another 100 companies that will be in a special demo area. It will be tough to report insightful details about 140 companies, but I will do my best to find the golden nuggets and really disruptive technologies.

Stay tuned!

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